After launching her career at the end of the 1950s, Carole King made history as a woman
in music, paving the way for whole generations of female singer-songwriters.
But there's still a lot most people don't know about this iconic musician.
This is the untold truth of Carole King.
Carole King's affinity for music began in the womb.
Her grandmother had taught her mother about music, and her mother likewise passed her
love of classical, pop, and show tunes down to King herself.
"My mother gave me lessons and then I really wanted to know everything, and she knew it."
In an interview, King once said:
"I loved music and it made a lot of sense to me the gift that I have for it.
I was able to understand it and learn it and recreate it.
[...] I don't know if they told me I was gifted, and I don't know if I knew I was gifted.
I just liked it.
I had almost perfect pitch."
King made her first recording, a rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," as a toddler,
in a recording booth in Coney Island.
She began playing the piano at age four, and as she grew older, her musical gifts helped
her navigate the insecurities and comparisons that often come with youth and adolescence.
As King herself says:
"I couldn't compete with girls who were thought of as beautiful, so I found my niche in music.
And that was where I found my beauty."
King formed her first band, a quartet called the Co-Sines, while she was a student at James
Madison High School in Brooklyn.
She then attended Queens College, where she met fellow future music star Paul Simon.
At the time, Simon was running a business creating studio demos for $25 a pop.
King and Simon were both first-year students when they met during a demo session, and soon
began performing and recording together.
Simon later recalled:
"The game was to make a demo at demo prices and then sell it to a record company.
Maybe you'd wind up investing $300 for musicians and studio time, but if you did something
really good, you could get as much as $1,000 for it.
I was never interested in being in groups, I was only after that $700 profit."
As a teenager in Brooklyn, Carole King ran in the same music circles as singer Neil Sedaka,
and the pair even dated in high school.
In an interview in 2012, Sedaka explained:
"I brought Carole King, who I dated in high school, up to Aldon [Music].
This was a Jewish phenomenon.
Neil Diamond lived across the street.
[...] Barbra Streisand.
Barry Manilow.
We all lived in Brooklyn.
It was a wonderful time."
In 1959, Sedaka, inspired by King, released the song "Oh!
Carol," which was met with major success.
The following year, King released a less successful song in response, titled "Oh!
Neil," which had similarly doting lyrics.
Sedaka sang King's praises in a 2012 interview with Billboard, saying:
"When you've written so many great ones like Carole King it's difficult to top yourself.
She's certainly one of the great pop writers of the last 50 years."
Carole King is one of the many songwriters who contributed to the historic "Brill Building
sound."
The Brill Building stands at 1619 Broadway in New York City.
It opened in 1931 and attracted all kinds of people from various levels of the music
industry, including composers, producers, and publishers, as well as musicians themselves.
King never actually worked at the famous building, though; she worked across the street at 1650
Broadway with her first husband, fellow songwriter Gerry Goffin.
She did, however, contribute to the general "Brill" sound.
She and Goffin worked on several hits of the 1960s, including The Drifters' "Up on the
Roof," Aretha Franklin's "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," Little Eva's "The
Loco-Motion," and The Shirelles' number-one hit "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow."
Carole King met fellow singer-songwriter James Taylor at a concert in New York City, and
the pair became fast friends.
It was Taylor who encouraged King to sing her own songs rather than only writing songs
for other musicians.
In the 1970s, King and Taylor were both living in the Laurel Canyon area of California, along
with several other prominent songwriters of the time.
Taylor told the Guardian in 2020:
"It really was a perfect moment, that Laurel Canyon period.
There was a sense of there being a community: myself, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Carole
King, Crosby, Stills and Nash.
David Geffen was in the mix a lot.
[...] You know, it was pretty much what they say.
Things really worked well."
Taylor and King continued to collaborate over the years, and even toured together as recently
as 2010.
"It's just amazing we've made it here, you know — it's been the thrill of a lifetime,
really."
One of Carole King's many undertakings in the music world was as part of a trio called
The City.
King formed the group in the late '60s, following her divorce from her first husband, Gerry
Goffin, and her move to Laurel Canyon.
King sang and played piano alongside Danny Kortchmar and Charles Larkey, the latter of
whom she married in 1970.
The City released its first and only album, Now That Everything's Been Said, in 1968.
King's stage fright prevented the group from touring, which led to poor promotion and the
eventual end of the group.
In 1970, King shifted to singing her own songs with the release of her first solo album,
Writer.
Among the album's tracks were "Up on the Roof," which was later covered by The Drifters, and
"Child of Mine," which was later covered by Billy Joe Royal.
Writer didn't gain nearly as much attention as King's sophomore effort, but it hit the
charts following her next album's wild success in 1971.
Carole King set two significant records in the 1970s.
Her second solo album, Tapestry, sold over 25 million copies worldwide.
At that time, it was the best-selling album ever made.
While this record has since been broken, Tapestry remains among the most commercially successful
albums in history.
On May 26th, 1973, King also drew the largest audience ever for a concert in Central Park.
The New York Times reported it was "one of the largest crowds ever to see a concert in
the park," with "well over 70,000 people" in attendance.
It has since been reported that the crowd set an all-time record with more than 100,000
people.
Stars such as Jack Nicholson and Joni Mitchell were in attendance, and the concert was filmed
from a "cherry picker" crane for television broadcast.
The original 1971 recording of Carole King's song "Where You Lead" included lyrics that
referred to a man who was perfectly capable of keeping the narrator happy.
Years later, however, King stopped performing the hit, because she felt its sentiments failed
to accurately reflect the times.
King's daughter and fellow singer-songwriter Louise Goffin, later said:
"[She] was not singing that song much anymore because it had these kind of 'stand by your
man' lyrics and she wasn't feeling it anymore.
She didn't feel like it was an empowering song."
But in 2000, King had the opportunity to revamp the song for the television series Gilmore
Girls.
She enlisted her daughter's help for a brand new rendition — one that would become the
show's theme song — featuring more modern lyrics centered around the relationship between
mother and daughter.
Goffin recalled:
"When she was singing it with me, it just gave it a whole new spin.
She realized she was singing from the point of view [of] a mother to a daughter rather
than a woman to a man."
Goffin and King both appeared in Gilmore Girls, too: King as Sophie, the owner of a music
store; and Goffin as the sister of the Stars Hollow troubadour.
While living in a cabin in the mountains of Idaho, Carole King grew inspired to participate
in environmental activism.
One of her major undertakings during her 30 years of activism has concerned the conservation
of the Rocky Mountain region.
She has spent nearly 20 years lobbying in favor of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection
Act, which was designed to protect the region from new construction and other man-made forces.
King even testified before Congress in favor of the NREPA as early as 2005, later appearing
in 2009 to testify in favor of the bill once more.
King was still advocating for the bill a decade later, in 2019, the year she told The Hill:
"There's a team of people that have been working on this for 20 years and it grew out of science.
And it was so visionary then that it anticipated climate change perhaps without knowing it
anticipated protecting a carbon sink."
King went on to explain a little more about the act's purpose, saying:
"It takes areas that are now roadless — that's a technical designation, but it also means
they don't have roads — in our national forests.
And it designates them as wilderness and gives them a higher level of protection."
As of 2021, lawmakers are still trying to push the bill through Congress.
On March 14th, 1972, at the 14th annual Grammy Awards, Carole King became the first woman
ever to win multiple Grammy Awards in the general category.
Tapestry won Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female.
"You've Got a Friend" won Song of the Year, and "It's Too Late" won Record of the Year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the album and both songs were later inducted into the Grammy
Hall of Fame.
The Recording Academy also awarded King the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award.
That same year, King made history once again as the first woman to ever receive the Library
of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
President Barack Obama gave King the award during a ceremony at the White House that
May.
"Behind so many of the songs touched our hearts, behind so many of the lyrics that have stirred
our souls, there was Carole."
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said at the time:
"For more than five decades, Carole King has enriched our lives through her music.
She has been an influential force in the industry and her music reflects the beauty and universality
of the human experience."
Carole King met her third husband, fellow musician Rick Evers, shortly after divorcing
her second.
They first encountered each other at a party thrown by Eagles frontman Don Henley.
It was love at first sight, and the couple holed up in a remote Idaho cabin for three
years.
King passed the time milking goats, skiing, and homeschooling her two children.
But there was trouble in their mountain paradise, as Evers became physically abusive towards
King.
In her 2012 memoir, King wrote:
"I had always been judgmental about women who stayed in abusive relationships.
I'd always thought, if I found myself with a man like that, the first time he struck
me I'd be out of there in a New York minute.
I would never stay with an abuser.
Until I did."
King later spoke about the abusive relationship in a 2012 interview with CNN.
"I stayed and I married him, after I knew about this."
"Why?"
"Again, hope springs eternal."
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical opened on Broadway in New York City on January 12th,
2014.
The musical followed King's journey through the music world as a singer and songwriter,
featuring actors including Supergirl star Melissa Benoist and "A Thousand Miles" singer
Vanessa Carlton in the titular role.
The musical was nominated for seven Tony Awards in 2014, and went on to win two: Best Performance
by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical, for Jessie Mueller, and Best Sound Design
of a Musical.
The musical's original Broadway recording also won a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater
Album in 2015.
Beautiful concluded its Broadway run in July 2019, after over five years.
As of 2019, it was the 27th longest-running Broadway musical of all time.
The show's North American tour continued beyond its Broadway run, and in 2015, Variety reported
that the musical was being adapted for the big screen.
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse, you can call the National
Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.